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The Legacy of Empire The Legacy of Empire The Legacy of Empire: Napoleon I and III and the Anglo-Italian Circle during the Risorgimento By Sharon Worley The Legacy of Empire: Napoleon I and III and the Anglo-Italian Circle during the Risorgimento By Sharon Worley This book first published 2018 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2018 by Sharon Worley All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-1666-0 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-1666-3 CONTENTS List of Illustrations .................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One ................................................................................................. 9 The Legacy of Napoleon I in Italy and the Emerging Anglo-Italian Style Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 73 Napoleon III: Regaining the Reins of Imperial Italy Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 91 Women, Revolution and the Anglo-Italian Style: Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Harriet Hosmer Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 135 William Wetmore Story: The Anglo-Italian Style and the Fulfilment of Historical Cycles Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 151 Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun and the Coded Map of Revolution Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 183 Henry James and Vernon Lee: The Conclusion to the Anglo-Italian Style Bibliography ............................................................................................ 191 Index ........................................................................................................ 209 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Fig. Intro-1. J. M. W. Turner, Pyramid Tomb of Gaius Cestius, Non- Catholic Cemetery, Rome (1794–7). Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Fig. Intro-2. William Wetmore Story, Angel of Grief (1894). Protestant Cemetery in Rome, IT. Fig. 1-3. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sir William Hamilton (1777). National Portrait Gallery, London. Fig. 1-4. Andrea Appiani. Napoleon, King of Italy (1805). Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Fig. 1-5. Elisabeth Vigee-LeBrunm, Lady Hamilton as a Bacchante (1792). National Museums, Liverpool, UK. Fig. 1-6. Antonio Canova, Muse (1812). Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France. Fig. 1-7. Elisabeth Vigee-LeBrunn. Countess Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi (1791). MetMuseum, New York. Fig. 1-8. J. M. W. Turner, Death of Nelson (1806–8). Tate Gallery, London. Fig. 1-9. Antonio Canova, Pauline Borghese as Venus (1804–5). Borghese Museum, Rome. Fig. 1-10. Antonio Canova, Helen (1812). Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Fig. 1-11. Francois Gerard, Corinne on Miseno (1817). Musée des Beaux- Arts, Lyon. Fig. 1-12. Thorvaldsen, Lord Byron (1821). Royal Collection Trust, UK. Fig. 1-13. Thorvaldsen, Napoleon (1830). Thorvaldsens Museum. Copenhagen, Denmark. Fig. 1-14. Benjamin Robert Haydon, Napoleon at St. Helena (before 1846). National Portrait Gallery, London. Fig. 1-15. Angelo Pizza, Napoleon in a Roman Toga. 1812-14. Palazzo Mocenigo, Venice, IT. Fig. 1-16. Sculpture of John C. Calhoun by Hiram Powers in City Hall (later removed to Columbia and destroyed when Sherman entered the city). Stereograph. New York City Public Library Collections. Fig. 3-17. Harriet Hosmer, Isabella, Queen of Castile (1893). World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago (current location unknown; presumed destroyed). viii List of Illustrations Fig. 3-18. Horatio Greenough, Venus Victrix and The Three Graces (1837–40). Boston Athenaeum, MA. Fig. 3-19. Hiram Powers, The Greek Slave (1851). Yale University Gallery, New Haven, CT. Fig. 3-20. Hiram Powers, Bust of Maria Antonia, Grand Duchess of Tuscany (1846). Worcester Art Museum, MA. Fig. 3-21. Antonio Canova, Tomb Monument of Vittorio Alfieri (1808). Santa Croce, Florence, IT. Fig. 4-22. Thomas Crawford, Bust of Charles Sumner (1842). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. Fig. 4-23. Harriet Hosmer, Medusa (1854). Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN. Fig. 4-24. Harriet Hosmer, Zenobia in Chains (1859). St. Louis Art Museum, MO. Fig. 4-25. William Wetmore Story, Sappho (1867). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Fig. 4-26. William Wetmore Story, Jerusalem in Her Desolation (1873). High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA. Fig. 4-27. Antonio Canova, Letizia Ramolina Bonaparte (1804–7). Museo di Capodimonte, Naples, IT. Fig. 4-28. William Wetmore Story, Semiramis (1873). Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX. Fig. 4-29. William Wetmore Story, Cleopatra (1858; carved 1869). New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. Fig. 5-30. Roman copy after Praxiteles’ Satyr (ca. 130 CE). Capitoline Museum, Rome, IT. Fig. 5-31. Louise Lander, Portrait bust of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1858). Concord Free Library, MA. Fig. 5-32. Edmonia Lewis, Death of Cleopatra (1876). Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C. Fig. 5-33. Harriet Hosmer, Clasped Hands (1853). National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Fig. 5-34. William Sargant, Lady with the Lamp (1913). Santa Croce, Florence, IT. INTRODUCTION “I shall not take you to the catacombs,” said Corinne. “Man is part of creation, and finds his own moral harmony in the universe. In the habitual order of fate, violent exceptions may astonish, but they create too much terror to be of service. Let us instead seek the pyramid of Cestius, around which all Protestants who die here find charitable graves.” (Germaine de Staël, 1807)1 To see the sun shining on its bright grass, fresh when we visited it, with autumnal dews, and hear the whispering of the wind among the leaves of the trees which have overgrown the tomb of Cestius, and the soil which is stirring in the sun-warm earth, to mark the tombs, mostly of women and young people who were buried there, one might, if one were to die, desire the sleep they seem to sleep. (Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818)2 Shelley's grave is here, buried in roses—a happy grave every way for the very type and figure of the Poet. Nothing could be more impenetrably tranquil than this little corner in the bend of the protecting rampart, where a cluster of modern ashes is held tenderly in the rugged hand of the Past. (Henry James, 1907)3 Italy attracted British and American authors and artists in the nineteenth century who sought to study the past while witnessing modern history in the making. The shadow of Napoleon I’s empire never left the nineteenth century and continued to haunt the histories and wars that followed. The empires of Napoleon I and his nephew, Napoleon III, set the stage for the pendulum swing of time from revolution to its antithesis, empire. The Anglo-Italian style developed as a reaction to these empires, the widespread devastation caused by imperial power, and the monuments it created. Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Harriet Hosmer, William Wetmore Story, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Vernon Lee and Edith Wharton responded to recurring themes in Italian Risorgimento politics and culture in the post-Napoleonic 1 Corinne to Oswald, Book V. Germaine de Staël. Corinne, or Italy. (1807), trans. Isabel Hill (New York: Armstrong & Co., 1884), 93–4. 2 Letter to Thomas Love Peacock, December 1818. Quoted in Nicholas Stanley- Price, The Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome (Rome: Non-Catholic Cemetery, 2014). www.Cemeteryrome.it. 3 Henry James, Italian Hours (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), 270. 2 Introduction Risorgimento period. Their unique contributions align them with a style that is distinguished by the themes of national independence, feminism, abolition of slavery, and republicanism. They perceived their own time in terms of parallel dimensions in which the past and present converged in national histories at home, in America and England, and in Italy, their new ideal state. The language of their new nationalism evolved from the chronological study of Ancient Rome to the Renaissance and the style of revolution, empire, and neoclassicism, while their perspective was largely shaped by a reactionary contrast between the empires of Napoleon I and Napoleon III, and an ideal state they envisioned for Italy. The prevailing styles in art continued to be neoclassicism and romanticism, which represented the iconologies of both empire and republic. On the one hand, the neoclassical style reinforced empire, and on the other, as an official academic style, it continued to represent the ideals of democracy well into the era of the American Civil War. However, when artists and authors responded to the republican hopes of the nation they admired, they continued to follow the style of art and literature established during Napoleon I’s reign. This style, inspired by neoclassicism and romanticism, lent itself to patriotic interpretations from both imperial and republican perspectives, where the same iconology that heralded the greatness and immortality of a modern emperor,
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